Together or alone, CSNY have been responsible for some of the most thrilling musical moments of my life. I will never forget Stephen Stills reinventing the language of the guitar during his “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” solo at my first CSN show; Graham Nash scaling the octaves like an acrobat in the final bars of an awe-inspiring “Guinnevere”; David Crosby roaring a defiant “Almost Cut My Hair” in the city that once sent him to jail; or Neil Young sculpting a “Tonight’s the Night” so long and disturbing that it might still be echoing today through another dimension. But nothing has touched me as deeply as the glorious rush of their voices raised in harmony. If there’s a more thrilling sound in creation, I haven’t found it yet.
I wouldn’t have considered writing this book if I didn’t love these musicians, and their music. But any close observer of this unpredictable and often catastrophically self-sabotaging group of songwriters has to confront the gulf between the spirit of their songs and the way they have conducted themselves in private and in public. Their songs are anthems of love, hope, and the power of togetherness; their career is testament to humanity’s frailty in the face of temptation and egotism.
In their own attempt to confront this enigma, three members of CSNY have already published memoirs. They have laid themselves bare in interviews and confessional songs. Yet despite all those words, all those explanations and excuses, I still felt as if the real story of this crusading, troubled band remained tantalizingly out of reach.
That was my quest. I wanted to find exactly who these four mercurial musicians were: where they came from, how they evolved, how they came together, and most important how they interacted with each other. Besides using my own interviews with them and their peers, I have delved deep into audio and video archives, which preserved almost sixty years of their music. I also exhumed decades of CSNY press coverage, because the media, and print journalism in particular, came to play a crucial role in the band’s career. Any history of public figures is also necessarily a history of their reputation, and few acts have been raised so high and then plunged so low by critical opinion. Each of the quartet has been hurt and bewildered by the way they were handled in the press, and those often-brutal verdicts left scars on the men and their music.
If you write about the past, even the recent past, you face the challenge of who and what to believe. As David Crosby used to say onstage in the heady and high 1970s, “Memory is the first thing to go.” That invariably amused fans who were probably almost as stoned as he was, and fertilized his well-tended image as the most artificially enhanced man in rock.
Even without cellular deterioration, the human memory is fallible, inaccurate, vague, in a state of constant flux, and susceptible to endless revision. We can accept that other people interpret events in vastly different ways from ourselves. What’s less comfortable for our delicate egos is that our own foolproof brains are just as capable of reinvention and plain misremembering.
The truth is that once we move beyond facts that can be checked or confirmed by documentary sources, all of our glimpses of the past are fragmentary. Imagine, then, the plight of those who are condemned to live in the past—to retrieve it for our collective entertainment. Imagine being asked questions (usually the same questions) about events that grow hazier every hour, and being expected to deliver verifiable Truth about a Past that can only be a Matrix-style simulation.
The first time I interviewed David Crosby, he shuffled into the room with Graham Nash, twenty minutes late, grumbling under his breath, and carefully avoiding any eye contact. Nash, ever the professional, shook my hand warmly and apologized for his friend. “David is suffering from jet shock,” he explained. Crosby reacted instantly to the mention of his name. “Ask me some questions if you fucking dare,” he snapped, still staring at the floor.
It was a moment for humor or bust. “Sounds like it’s time to ask Crosby the Woodstock question,” I said to Nash. Crosby spluttered slightly, then looked at me for the first time and couldn’t prevent the sparkle from creeping back into his eyes. “Yeah,” he muttered, “or what about ‘When are you guys getting back together?’ That’s the other one people always ask us, even when we’re all in the same room.”
Any celebrity lives under the same curse: being asked to relive solitary moments from a hectic lifetime of experience and make them new. With each retelling of what really happened at Woodstock, another sliver of genuine memory is shaved away, and replaced by the pseudo-memory of myth. That’s why most celebrities rely on a selection of well-worn anecdotes: it’s easier to remember those than it is to wade through decades of mist in search of an authentic reminiscence of the past. In any case, “authentic” memory has long since slipped away. Answer the same question every day for fifty years, and soon all you can remember is what you said yesterday.
With Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, the issue is complicated manifold by the fact that four individuals with turbulent pasts and rampant egos have often sparred over the same raw material. A classic example is the disagreement about when and where Crosby, Stills, and Nash first sang together. For anyone who has tried to locate verifiable facts amid the band’s collective fog of misinformation, it’s strangely gratifying to learn that as early as December 1968, CSN were unable to agree on a mutually satisfactory answer to this question, and the three men have been squabbling about it ever since.
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young are all notoriously uncertain about the past, but only occasionally admit it. Of the quartet, Graham Nash has often been the least reliable, not because he has a worse memory than his former partners, but because he has always been more generous in granting interviews and has offered more hostages to fortune. As an example, he has variously claimed to have written “Teach Your Children” as early as 1967 and as late as 1971. (And why should he care that it was actually 1968? What’s important to him is how he wrote the song, not when.) Even close proximity to events did not always improve his recall. The day after the conclusion of CSNY’s six-night run at the Fillmore East in 1970, Nash recounted memorable moments from the shows in an interview—and got the chronology completely wrong. Does it matter? Only if you like to believe everything you are told.
The same applied to David Crosby, who at least had the grace to admit that “I’m no good with years and dates, man.” I initially met him at a promotional party for his first autobiography, at the end of which he fell into a heated argument with a friend of mine about whether or not he had ever written a song called “Psychodrama City.” He had, and I knew it, but I timidly kept out of the fight to avoid upsetting one of my musical heroes. What I remember more than my cowardice is Crosby’s absolute conviction in his false memory and his refusal to consider backing down. My friend could have played him a tape of the song there and then, and Crosby would still have insisted that he was right.
As for Stephen Stills, he would remember that he was in Los Angeles when he heard Jimi Hendrix had died, or at his mother’s house in San Francisco, but he was actually in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. He had an authentic memory of his sense of bereavement but could no longer summon up the circumstances. Distanced by age from the more turbulent episodes of his youth, Stills came to dismiss discussion of his misdemeanors as “just gossip,” in a tone that carried its own “Do Not Enter” sign. His interview currency was impressions, not facts; emotional shockwaves from the past, not statements about it. His dry, deadpan humor and often-combative nature could lead him to goad companions with tales of his service in Vietnam during the 1960s, which in turn would lead them, and all those who transmitted the stories, to conclude that Stills was certifiably insane. Graham Nash may once have mused that “if Stephen was not Stephen Stills, he would have been committed long ago.” But the man I’ve met over the decades has not been crazy, merely erratic and wounded by events—many of which, located in his childhood, were utterly beyond his control.
And Neil Young? As befitted a man who built a career around ambiguity and lack of commitment, he was the first member of CSNY to admit—or plead—frailty of memory. As early as 1970, he would lazily deflect questions about Buffalo Springfield, who had split just two years earlier: “Well, I can’t really remember, man. That’s back so long.” In 1975 he admitted to the teenage journalist Cameron Crowe, who skillfully elicited Young’s most revealing confessions: “Just keep one thing in mind—I may remember it all differently tomorrow.”
Unlike his peers, Young rarely sought to offer the press variations on well-practiced tales. Perhaps the closest he came was a familiar story about sharing a pickup with Jimi Hendrix at the Woodstock festival. But when Sylvie Simmons of Mojo magazine urged him to repeat the yarn in 1997, Young was honest enough to refuse: “You know, to tell the truth, it’s been so long since it happened . . . I don’t know, I can’t remember. You know, at first it was pretty clear, and then people started giving me so many different versions of how it was, I started going, ‘Well, what do I know?’ I’m getting so vacant.” Of course, by the time he came to write his first book, fifteen years later, he trotted out the anecdote as if he had just stepped off the truck, because publishers don’t like their memoirists to advertise their evasion and amnesia too blatantly.
As if CSNY weren’t prey to their own erratic recall, their fame and its excesses left them open to exaggeration, invention, and worse from those who spent time in their orbit (or claimed they did). The four men have been so open about their dalliances with women, narcotics, and herbal stimulants that people will believe almost anything about them. All of them—but especially David Crosby and Stephen Stills—have become such powerful symbols of hedonism and egomania that any story about them can easily be embellished by quadrupling the quantity of drugs, doubling their unpleasantness, or simply substituting their names for those of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, or Keith Richards in rock’s most jaded tales of debauchery.
All of which is an explanation of why, in writing about CSNY, sharing time with them and their peer group as a journalist and now biographer, and endlessly revisiting their lives and their music, I have chosen to mix my curiosity with a healthy dose of skepticism. In my experience, contemporary accounts of events are almost always more accurate and reliable than recollections delivered decades later. Hindsight may improve your understanding of your life, but the passage of time can also distance you from its reality.